14 May

iphone

Okay, I succumbed to the temptation and got one.

A number of annoyance have presented themselves already, in just the few hours that I’ve owned it.

First off, when you get the thing, it’s in a fancy box with all the bits and pieces in it. I took all of the bits out, and found a nice rectangular cardboard box which when opened, held the documentation. I took out the documentation and read through it, discarding the box. Couldn’t figure out how to install the SIM card into the machine, as the documentation did not mention it anywhere. After an hour or so of puzzling over it, I finally noticed that the documentation box, which I had discarded, had a weird little diagram on it, which when deciphered, explained how to do it. Way to go Apple – in this case, I did RTFM, but TFM didn’t have the instructions I needed.

Secondly. After going through the jumpy-hoopy thing of filling in a form and waiting 24 hours to be allowed to own the machine (for some reason) and then waiting another hour for the receptionist at the shop to finally get through to O2 to activate the SIM, I was just picking up everything and the guy said “ok, now you just need to activate it through iTunes”. Excuse me?? It’s a fucking phone! I can’t get iTunes running on any of my computers at home anyway because I don’t have anything that runs Windows or Mac! I spent hours trying to get Wine to install iTunes, but finally had to give up and do it on an old WinXP machine in the office the next day.

Then, I wanted an SSH client for the thing. There is a cool store for the iPhone called appStore, and there were a number of SSH clients in there. In order to get one of them, though, you need an account and some cash.

First off, I tried to just create an account. This went okay, up until the point where iTunes asked what my credit card number was. I don’t have a credit card, and don’t want one. After a while, I figured out that the only way to get an account for free (or at least, without giving Apple credit card details), is to apply to download an app which is specified as free – for some reason, in that case, Apple adds a “none” option to the list of payment methods.

So I had an account, but still couldn’t pay for anything. Apple claim that they accept PayPal, and even supply instructions on how to do it. Unfortunately, it falls down immediately, because step two says to click Edit Credit Card or Add Credit Card in your iTunes account page, but those links don’t exist! Maybe they exist if there is already a credit card attached to the account, but that defeats the entire purpose!

But it’s a nice phone, really.

5 thoughts on “iphone

  1. Ok a few things…

    I had the exact same problem with the SIM card thing. It took me like an hour to figure out how to get it in. That diagram and the we pointy thing are really not that noticeable. And the lack of documentation is astounding.

    Secondly about the whole app store thing.. ARE YOU CRAZY? The app store is bullshit. What you need to do is jailbreak:

    http://www.iphonehacks.com/jailbreak_iphone/

    It is the best thing that I have done with my iPhone. It gives you access to multiple methods of getting apps, you are not restricted to just the app store. And you guessed it all apps from those alternative sources are OSS! Everything. Believe me I have had an iPhone for about a year now and have not paid for a thing.

    If you were impressed by the iPhone you will be 10x impressed by the jailbroken iPhone. You can do anything. I have a terminal on my iPhone, with VIM, FTP and even PHP installed! The possibilities are endless…. I’m sure you could get SSH. The whole look and feel of the phone can even be changed! You should take a look at mine some day and see what your missing! 🙂

    Yes having to use Windows or Mac is a bit of a downside. But then again if you can get the iPhone working on Linux then you have just tapped into a goldmine!

  2. wow! that’s cool! I’m really damned impressed. wasn’t sure what this jail-break thing would do, but that’s just made the phone a million times more useful!

  3. you should buy gphone not iphone crap :d
    here’s my maven2 plugin for android SDK – android is linux based OS for gphone.

    code.google.com/p/mvndroid/

  4. I did actually look for a gphone first, but they’re not yet available in Ireland, and I wasn’t going to jump through hoops to get it!

    I’d love to get one when ever they are available. I’ve been thinking of apps to write, and would prefer to write in a Linux environment than BSD.

Leave a Reply